Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Well, folks, I did it. Last October, my disgust at my own website negligence caused me to borrow a page from the book of Ze, and I promised myself that I would write one post every weekday for a year. Aside from a few planned outages and holidays, I met that goal. The time has come to reflect.

We began on October 2, 2006, with a haiku. My reasoning was that if I couldn’t come up with anything better, it should be easy enough to string together seventeen syllables of pseudo-Japanese poetry. The haiku format also provided structure and constraints for me to work with. It’d be cheating if I just allowed myself to bang out, “La la frivo blah poop,” and call it a post. October, as it happens, also contains one of my favorites.

The past year was full of surprises. Some of the the writing I’m most proud of failed to get so much as a blip on the internet’s radar, whereas some things I thought were trash proved inexplicably popular. The top five search terms landing people at my site over the past year were:

1. 300 abs (It’s true. Sex, or close to it, sells.)
2. jon22.net (I really should have registered this domain and forwarded it here.)
3. broodax (We are born in flesh!)
4. even stevphen (All praise be to Carell.)
5. even stephven (All praise be to Colbert.)

What have I learned about my writing in the past year? I have the most fun when I write about movies and television. I’m most passionate when I write about disability. I didn’t write about science nearly as much as I thought I would. My writing’s pretty good. It’s not nearly good enough.

So, out of the past year, here’s a few of my personal favorites:

• michael j. fox, rush limbaugh, and visibility
• child’s play
• how to survive the war on christmas
• dear champagne colored sedan
• reviewing Epic Movie without seeing it
• haiku: ted haggard (It’s my favorite because it rhymes.)
• hypothetical grad school interview
• the tennessee center for policy research spouts bullshit about al gore
• how does he act so well?
• why i didn’t like spider-man 2
• deconstructing the microsoft mba guy
• the right way to watch soccer

And in the “WTF?” column we have:

• the virtues of vortex
• magic trick number one
• not so quicker picker upper
• if fruit could talk: strawberry

The past year has been fun. I’ve nearly quintupled my previous traffic, and I’ve shown myself that I have the discipline to stick to something if I really, really try.

Now the time has come to sit you all down (and I still feel like it’s only five of you) and have a little talk. I can’t keep this daily thing going anymore. Grad school occupies too much of my time to maintain that level of commitment. There’s a chapter’s worth of neuropsychology that I thought I was going to read tonight instead of writing this.

That said, it’s hard to undo something that you’ve been doing for so long. It is my sincerest hope to keep things semi-regular around here. Given that I do so much reading and writing these days, it might be a good idea to use this site to exercise the other half of my brain and get back to Photoshop. The wallpapers I’ve done have proven quite popular, anyway.

So, thanks for sticking with me over the past year. I am by no means gone, I just won’t be writing every day. As always, if you really loved me, you’d leave a comment.

-Jon